MainOne staves off competition with ‘open access’ strategy

. . . Sets July 1 for commercial rollout
Ben Uzor Jr

As the number of submarine cable system increases on the Nigerian coastline, Main One Cable Company has revealed that its open access strategy which dictates that the cable will not be in direct competition with telecommunications operators but rather provide high value wholesale bandwidth at affordable costs would definitely be the distinguishing factor as competition thickens in the cable sub-sector.

However, the company has announced that it will launch its high capacity fibre-optic cable system on 1 July in Ghana and Nigeria. Last month, the firm completed the first phase of installation from Accra in Ghana to Lagos, Nigeria, and has begun testing network equipment. Phase 1 of the system spans 6,800km from Seixal in Portugal through the West African coast to Ghana and Nigeria and will deliver 1.93Tbps of much-needed international capacity into West Africa where rapid growth in telecoms has been blighted by limited global connectivity.

Business Day learnt gathered MainOne was on the verge of completing formalities that would herald the commencement of the Phase 2 of the project which will witness an extension of the cable to South Africa. Furthermore, it was learnt that the company has built an extensive terrestrial fibre-optic last mile network spanning 26km from the cable landing station in Oponbo to a point of presence in Saka Tinubu, Lagos. This was strategically designed to ease access to customers and ensure high availability of service.

Funke Opeke, chief executive officer, Main One who spoke to Business Day at the WAFICT conference and exhibition recently said: “We are open access which makes a lot of our operators’ customers feel comfortable. We provide services to all operators; we are not a retail operator, we only do business on a wholesale basis. So, we are not competing with them, its shared infrastructure. Our objective is to deliver superior value to them at a reduced cost in an open pricing scheme. You get a higher discount if you buy more volume or if you subscribe for a longer period. So, no operator is treated unfairly.

“They can truly focus on just acquiring the capacity and then concentrating on their business and service to the retail customers. So, we think that makes operators comfortable in working with us. Our focus is delivering them high value on our cable and not focusing on other retail businesses or other sectors in which we are participating. We think the service focus, value focus and open access model clearly differentiates us. The open access says we will not compete with operators and our objective is to reduce our cost, increase the value so that they can be successful their business”, she added.

In the same vein, Jonny Coleman, head, network planning and implementation, Main One Cable Company said: “We are working very closely with our customers as well on the last mile deployment. In Nigeria, we have built an extensive fibre-optic terrestrial last mile network about 26 km from our cable landing station in Oponbo to a point of presence in Saka Tinubu to ease access to customers. Infrastructure deployment costs are pretty high, so you can appreciate the level of investment we put in this network. It is supposed to be a redundant network. All this are in place and been tested with a target date of end of June and a commercial launch date of July 1.

Recently, Main One signed a deal with Huawei Nigeria to provide it with its Intelligence Optical Switching System (OptiX OSN 9500) to serve as the backbone platform to provide high transmission bandwidths in the region. Main One has also inked a maintenance contract with Alcatel-Lucent for Phase 1 of the system. The agreement will enable Main One to address the need for managing and maintaining the network at the highest level of performance delivered at the lowest operating cost.